Sunday, February 9, 2014

Tilemaps, Pixels & The Lost Assets

Sometimes shit happens. And sometimes it gets you pretty fucked up. These days I've added two more clans in the character creation screen: Brujah and Malkavian. The good news is that I'm pretty happy with the final result and the overall character editor thing. The bad news is that I've lost most of my character editor assets (the pixelart pieces that form each character portrait). And, beleive it or not, it happened in the only folder I have not versioned in SVN. So it's a real loss, I can't get it back from the SVN repository. Of course, I'll work my ass in the following weeks to somewhat rework the lost pixels (somewhere around 60 assets) and make sure to keep all the pixelwork in a remote repository.

Also, I've had some time to work a bit on the interface design in Bloodhunt. Remember that crappy notifications in Bloodlines when you're informed that you have won some experience points? Here's a small reminder in case you've forgotten (also a great picture of our beloved fellow Bertram Tung).

I realized Bloodhunt needs a cool notification system so I just started a little concept about it. The black bar comes in from the right side of the screen, shows the message (experience rewarded, quest log updated or wathever) and the it goes back again.

In the programming side, I'm starting to integrate tilemaps and layers (which are ridiculously simple with Flixel). For those who're not familiar with good old 2D pixelart gaming lore, a tilemap or tilesheet is a picture containing small tiles that will be used for designing a bigger game level. In some sense, it's like a pixel pallete. In the lower left corner of the screenshot you can see the tilemap pallete, with my 56x56 tiles. The road level is entirely composed of these tiles. I know it's not the most interesting map ever, but it's a good starting point. It will look a lot better with a bit of texturing, lighting and characters on top.